So today I wanna talk about “The Boof”.
As per usual on my weekend entries, I had a bit more time than usual to “construct” my thoughts yesterday. I use “construct” in quotation marks since, as is pretty evident by the slapdash style employed here, I hardly ever really know what I’m gonna write before I commit it to pixilated eternity. Just sorta go with the flow. It works on two levels: on one level, you the reader get unfettered access to the way my mind works; on another level, I’m spared the task of rewriting. So, it’s a you scratch my back, I sip a margarita while you do so, sort of arrangement.
Point of the matter is, I didn’t intend to drop some serious “Teen Wolf” knowledge on all y’all. Just sorta happened. Tim posed me a query, I sat down at my keyboard, took a deep breath, popped a few pills, and boom, an essay did emerge. (If anyone has any idea how I ended up just outside of Worcester last night at 4 am, I’d love to know, incidentally.)
Many people often ask me, “Hey, Ryan, how do you keep coming up with new things to write about?” OK, they don’t. Usually it’s my mother saying, “Um, people don’t think we dropped you on your head as a baby, do they?” Still, coming up with new, exciting and endlessly offensive content is a daily challenge. As such, I’ve developed a few short hands so that I never dry up the cerebral well. Here are the basic ways a topic for the blog evolves:
1) I’m watching a TV show/movie or listening to a radio station/CD and inspiration strikes. I stop what I’m doing and find a computer quickly. Sometimes I need to pop into a Kinko’s before the idea flutters away like my cocaine slush fund. In times like these, I often write on my arm in magic marker in crunch time. If things get really bad, I mug a local camera crew, videotape my thoughts, and rush home to type them out.
2) Someone (OK, Tim) says, “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if you blogged about Topic X?” These work pretty well since I don’t actually have to think about what to write. I can just react, and reacting is what I do best. I’m like a mirror, albeit a funhouse one. I reflect stuff back quite nicely; emitting from an original source is the hard part.
3) I’ll read something, go “Damnit, I wish I had thought of that,” and go ahead and paraphrase unaccredited. Or make things up. (This example is sponsored by a grant from the New York Times.)
4) Gather a few random thoughts that had been swirling in my head, but were never worth more than 75 words of me energy apiece, link them through a BS topic sentence (thank you, English degree), and pretend like they have always been part of the same thought process, not a slapdash, desperate move to give them peoples what they so want, oh yes, so very nice-a.
5) Pull a Gertrude Stein and automatic type until the spell is broken. This is always a lot of fun for me, since it involves nothing so much as minimal amount of the time I have left remaining on this earth until I’m dead, buried, and filled with worms. Also, if anyone asks what the hell it’s supposed to be, I can give them a disdainful emoticon and say, “Well, if I HAVE to tell you, I guess you wouldn’t understand the answer, now would you?”
OK, now that the magic has been ruined for all of you (except for maybe The Cheat), let’s get to The Boof.
My brother yesterday thought that the Platonic notion of The Boof could be further explored, so already we’re in a Type 2 blog here, people, with the potential for Type 4 and Type 5 both making a guest appearance as the blog continues. Keep track at home, keep score, create posters, get some pom poms and don a cheerleader outfit, do some splits, and…damn, Type 5 hit already. Sorry. He’s usually much later in the entry than this.
Now, in keeping with the 80’s theme from yesterday, “The Boof” is just another name for “The Duckie”. In both instances, what we’ve got is the terminally “uncool”, but extremely sweet friend who would treat as good, if not better, the people the protagnist either tries to get with or eventually does get. For instance, Blane isn’t a jackass, but we root for Duckie, mostly because scientists have found we’re genetically programmed to hate Andrew McCarthy. Seriously, look it up. 8th chromosome.
These people are “uncool” because the social castes in these films are tighter than a Britney Spears tube top. Boof can play a mean basketball (albeit with a 50-year old guy, but he’s a werewolf, so that’s OK), and Duckie could be a serious rock star, as evidenced by his great lip synching in the record store. However, the generic “Bitchy Blonde Bimbo/Arrogant Male Bimbo” will never let these people truly be accepted as cool. As such, our protagonist, who abides by these social structures until the final reel (usually breaking free from the shackles of conforming at the prom or in a karate tournament) cannot truly like “The Boof” until said Boof has been humiliated by our hero figure, usually in public and/or a house party where a TERRIBLE SECRET is revealed, at roughly the 62 minute mark.
(Seriously. Go rent any of these films. Check out the running time. Do an over/under on “The Sh$t Hath Hit the Fan” moment in the film…I’d pick “Running time of film minus 18 minutes” every time. Good examples of this type of scene: the "He paid me!" scene in "Can't Buy Me Love". "It was all a bet!" in "She's All That!" Or "You-sa people gonna die??!!" from "The Phantom Menance". Thank you, Types 4 and 5, for this little aside.)
The function of The Boof is to make the audience go either “Awww” or “You effin’ tool!”, depending on the demographic makeup of both The Boof and the audience watching said Boof. We as the audience see The Boof silently suffer throughout the film, waiting for the hero to wake up and do one of the following to The Boof:
Really, at any given part of our lives, we are a Boof to someone, or have a Boof we don’t know about. I like this idea, in that saying, “Dude, you’re so her Boof” just makes me giggle. It’s also much less cruel that saying, “Dude, you’re never, ever gonna hit that. Ever.” The incredibly overt gestures that the cinematic Boofs pull off are far from exaggeration, because in real life, we as Boofs do the most amazingly overt actions that either get ignored or misinterpreted all the time. Just outstanding. The object of our affection either plain ol’ can’t see, or perhaps won’t see it. Won’t get into the different scenarios today, maybe another time. Either way, no matter how many, “THIS time they will know how I really feel!” scenarios they execute, it always misses its mark.
(The other variation of The Boof Pursuit, the “I love you I love you I love you, why don’t/can’t you love me back” variety, will in real life end up in a lawsuit, and as such is not worthy of being discussed here.)
More annoyingly, we real life Boofs often don’t get our happy ending in 100 minutes or less. We do eventually get that happy ending though. Unless like, you get hit by a bus five minutes before achieving inner clarity. That would like, prevent the happy ending, is what I’m saying.
So here’s my meme of the month: The Boof. They are everywhere, all around us. (They're like the Matrix, without the living-in-squishy-pink-liquid aspect.) One serves you a sandwich at the deli today. Another sat next to you on the train. Another one asked you if you had accepted the Communist Party as your Lord and Savior. All around is, is what I’m saying. We need to re-examine our cinematic forefathers and see what we can’t learn from them. (Certainly not any fashion tips, that’s for certain.) Any tips you have learned would be appreciated.
In the meantime: Salt and Pepa, take us home:
Here I go, here I go, here I go again
Peeps, what’s my method? Pen! OK then.
To paper, to paper, puttin’ this stuff down
Type it all up, and then I just look around
At my screen, to see what I be typin’
And I say to myself, “Yo, I be hypin’
All up this joint, no doubt, no diggity
I wrote me an entry, now it’s time for a figgity
Newton, a cookie, a cracker, yo I don’t care
Gots me an appetite, why y’all gotta stare?
I’ve worked real hard, cuz my momma, she taught me right
Gotta publish something dope, before I hit the light
In my room, so I can just go to my bed
Get all them thoughts unstuck from inside my head
And maybe, just maybe, try something like a rap song
Give it a go, and see if they’ll go along
They might not, but really, yo, it’s all good
Cuz hardly any of them be livin’ in my neighborhood
So they can’t just like, come over to my house
Knock on the door, say, “Yo, where be that louse?”
Cuz I wouldn’t answer, hell no, they got poor grammar
I’ll just disappear like my man MC Hammer
From the spotlight, I’ll run real far away
Take my computer, and live to write another day
Cuz that’s how it is, livin’ here on the Blogside
Write down them words, and watch your own backside
Blog or be blogged, I’ll live to die another day
And just like Bond, I’m gonna find it my own way
To get things done, get the girl, save the planet
Y'all will be amazed, just stuck there like granite.
Makes me wanna Boof Boof Boof…
Word.